For the past four years, Nintendo has the market to itself 
when it comes to motion control gaming. That’s finally coming to an end – and it has some people wondering about how the company will fare moving forward.
In mid-September, Sony launched PlayStation Move, a motion sensor that mimics – and, in some ways, improves upon – the Wii remote. Come November, Microsoft will join the fight with Kinect, a camera-based system that eliminates the need for controllers altogether.
While Nintendo kicked off the motion control revolution 
four years ago and quickly dominated the field, Microsoft and Sony are betting there’s a lot of life — and money — left in the category.
Last Sunday, Sony’s new PlayStation Move controller went on sale and in November Microsoft will launch Kinect, it’s motion-tracking camera that essentially transforms players’ bodies into the controller. Both products are gambles — and, to some degree, risks — for the companies, who are hoping to keep the current generation of video game systems relevant for several years.
So now it’s official: Microsoft’s first-person behemoth Halo: 
Reach is the year’s biggest entertainment event,generating $200 million in sales in just 24 hours in the United States alone.
That’s two-thirds of what Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 took in from the North American and U.K. markets in its first day last year, but it’s still a number that’s nothing to sneeze at. The one-day take already eclipses the three-day opening weekends of “Iron Man 2,” “Toy Story 3” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Prequels rarely resonate with audiences – regardless 
of the medium. So when Bungie Studios decided to make its last “Halo” game a prequel, there was some cause for concern.
Thankfully, those fears were misplaced. While the final chapter of “Halo: Reach” is something well known to any fan of the franchise, the game itself is perhaps the best in “Halo’s” nine-year history. And it’s a fitting sendoff for the developer, who is responsible for creating and growing one of the biggest series in the video game industry.
The holiday season kicks off tonight for gamers. At 12:01am
, “Halo Reach,” the first blockbuster of the fall/winter goes on sale. It will lead the charge of a densely packed 3.5-month period of major game releases that will determine how 2010 turns out for the video game industry.
Now, normally, you wait for sales numbers before calling a release a blockbuster – but when you’re dealing with a new action-based “Halo” game, you can skip the formality. The franchise has sold over 34 million copies and consumed 3.3 billion hours of gameplay (that’s over 376,000 years, if you’re keeping score at home) since its launch with the original Xbox.
When “Halo: Reach” goes on sale at 12:01 am 
Tuesday morning, it won’t just be the biggest gaming event of the year to date. It will likely be the entertainment industry’s biggest moment of the year.
Microsoft is betting big on the latest installment of its flagship franchise, and it has every reason to do so. Life to date, the company has sold more than 34 million ‘Halo’ games – and each major new release has shattered any Day One sales records set by the film, music or gaming industries.
While August sales figures gave the video game 
industry yet another dose of bad news, at least Electronic Arts had something to smile about.
Software sales for the industry as a whole fell 14 percent last month to $403.5 million, according to NPD Group. That’s the worst performance for the month in three years and more than twice as bad as what some analysts were expecting.
No one had real high expectations for last month’s 
video game sales. And that’s probably a good thing, since it turned out to be the worst August in three years.
Software sales fell 14 percent last month to $403.5 million, according to The NPD Group – more than twice as much as some Wall St. analysts were expecting. Hardware sales, meanwhile, were 5 percent below 2009’s level, at $282.9 million – and the Wii had its worst sales month since the system’s launch.
Chris Morris: Journalist 